If you’re looking for a lightweight and compact machine with pretty great specs, Lenovo’s IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon is the laptop for you. Weighing only 2.3lbs, this laptop is the perfect travel companion. It is slim, sleek and stunning. We highly recommend this powerhouse of a machine.
Gorgeous Body
The Slim 7 Carbon features a beautiful body. Housed in an ultra-lightweight chassis, this laptop is one of the lightest 14’’ OLED laptops on the market. Its body is built with an aerospace-grade magnesium alloy and reinforced with multiple layers of carbon fiber. The carbon fiber reinforcement gives it the smooth and clean aesthetic it offers. Along with being lightweight, it is also very durable. Featuring military-grade toughness, the Slim 7 is a fairly sturdy machine. According to the company, the machine has passed nine military-grade tests for durability and meets the MIL-STD 810H requirements. Clearly, the laptop is a lot tougher than it looks.
The underside of the laptop has been deliberately left empty. You usually come across large vents on the bottom covers that negatively affect the aesthetic appeal. Instead, Lenovo has taken a minimalist approach with this machine. It only hosts a pair of rubber feet for enhanced grip on smooth surfaces. To further improve grip, the edges on the bottom have also been raised. The lid of the laptop has strategically been cut out from the center to ease the process of opening the machine with one hand. It’s seemingly insignificant features like these that make Lenovo an incredibly thoughtful company.
Trimmed Bezels
The Slim 7 has a brilliant display. Featuring almost no bezels, the 14’’ display offers as much real estate to work on as it possibly can. Not only do you benefit from maximum space to work on, but the no-bezel display looks absolutely gorgeous too. There is a camera at the top with an AI sensor for easy log-in. The display is bright, vibrant and clear. It offers a brightness of 400 nits along with Dolby Vision. The multi-touch 14’’ screen has an aspect ratio of 16:10 and a 2.8K screen resolution. The Slim 7 hosts an OLED screen and offers a 100% DCI-P3 color gamut.
Even with my blinds all the way up and the sun falling right onto the laptop’s screen, the colors were sharp and crisp. I used the Slim 7 for quite a few things ranging from watching documentaries, gaming and doing my design work on Adobe Illustrator. The video and image quality was excellent and offered a cinematic feel to the content I watched. The saturation was just perfect; sometimes the saturation makes the blacks look too dark or the whites too washed. The Slim 7 made sure to avoid that mistake.
Responsive Keyboard
The keyboard on this brilliant machine is pretty responsive. Its low latency coupled with the crisp feel of the keys made my experience of typing on it quite pleasant. The keys have a snappy element to them; they produce a sharp sound that was much lower in volume compared to my personal computer. They have rounded edges and a matte finish. The Slim 7 doesn’t feature a full-sized keyboard so you don’t get a numpad. However, its function keys double as some pretty useful controls that you can make use of, especially the 6-row multimedia Fn keys. The keyboard is backlit, so that’s a plus for night owls who prefer to work with the lights out. Apart from two of the arrow keys, the rest are all full-sized so people with hands that are larger than usual will face no issues in manual dexterity.
The Precision Touchpad is glass-coated which gives it a nice finish. It is also fairly generous in size, again accommodating people with bigger hands. In terms of responsiveness, the buttonless multi-touch touchpad impressed me as much as the keyboard did.
(Way too) Minimal Controls
It seems as if companies are in a competition to produce products with the least number of controls possible. Lenovo took the same route with this machine. All that the Slim 7 offers are two USB-C 3.2 Gen 2 ports, one USB-C 3.2 Gen 1 port for power delivery only and a headphone and mic combo 3.5mm jack. The only other toggles you see on the sides of the laptop are the power button and the webcam privacy switch. In order to make up for the absence of the HDMI and USB-3 port, Lenovo includes a USB-C 3-in-1 dongle in the package.
When I am working on my laptop, convenience is my top priority. If that means slightly compromising on the aesthetic of my machine to add a port or two, I don’t mind. I would certainly not sign up to use a dongle for basic functions requiring a USB-3 port. Accessories like these tend to get misplaced too, and I wouldn’t want to lose two ports on my laptop because of a small mess-up. Purchasing a new dongle would also be irritating.
Exceptional Performance
The Slim 7 did a brilliant job at performing exceptionally well under pressure. I tested the machine by transferring data on it while running heavy software and having a number of open and running tabs. Usually, when I put my Lenovo IdeaPad L3 go through so much stress, it fails. It takes a while to process the load and runs when it’s ready. The Slim 7, however, didn’t lag for even a second. It ran at maximum capacity throughout and passed all the tests I put it through with flying colors.
The laptop features the AMD Ryzen 5800U processor, 16GB RAM and 512GB SSD storage. The unit comes with integrated AMD Radeon graphics so don’t expect the kind of performance a dedicated graphics card will give you. However, considering that it’s not targeted at gamers, its performance is more than sufficient.
Is It Hardcore?
For sure.
The Lenovo IdeaPad Slim 7 Carbon is definitely a machine that is worth investing in. It has a gorgeous chassis, impressive performance and a responsive keyboard. If the lack of controls isn’t a complete dealbreaker for you, go for it.
